Naughty Dog to keep current engine for PS4 projects

Naughty Dog has confirmed it will retain its game engine from PS3 releases Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception and The Last of Us moving forward onto PS4.

Speaking with Digital Spy, The Last of Us game director Bruce Straley explained why the studio wasn’t starting over with a new engine, “We learned a big lesson coming from PS2 to PS3. There was a lot of hype over what next-gen was going to be.

“It was all going to be like movies, like a pre-rendered cutscene-style fidelity. That turned out not to be true. Granted, what we’re able to do now is pretty damn close, but it took Naughty Dog four games to get there – one of the top developers in the industry with some on the most amazing scientists working in our programming department.”

“We scrapped everything at the beginning of Uncharted 1, and we had a perfectly good engine with the Jak & Daxter franchise. We could have started with something there and then built off of it and only changed the pieces and parts as we needed, when we needed. And that really caused a lot of turmoil.”

Straley added that Naughty Dog will retain its existing engine moving on to PS4 and explained that it’s easier to change parts of the framework to meet the studio’s needs as and when new challenges arise.

“We learned our lesson in saying, as we move into development into next-gen, we want to take our current engine, port it immediately over as is and say, ‘Okay, we have a great AI system, we have a good rendering system’.

“We have all these things that already work. Only when we hit a wall will we say, ‘When do we need to change something? When do we need to scale it? ‘When does the gameplay, when does the story, when does the world that we need to create – when does this engine hit the wall? Right, now we need to change this part of the engine.'”

What do you make of the Naughty Dog engine at present? Does it need work, or is it fine as it is? Let us know below.